EAT ME
OCTOBER 23/24 2026
8pm
Norla Dome, Mission to Seafarers
A solo dance theatre work created and performed by Narrm based artist, Jessica Thompson, EAT ME brings her two decades of artistic and personal experience to a work bridging dreamscapes with domesticated reality.
Fed up with confinement and idealisation, Venus steps beyond her shell and hosts a private dinner party for the unknown. She opens an oyster, inadvertently serving and consuming herself and descends into a delirium underworld where love and death, brutality and pleasure, delicacy and mutilation are one. Only with a horrific sacrifice can she realise her losses and return to the topside world. Can she take a shucking knife to her own heart in order to live?
Part confession, part prayer, part finger to systemic numbness EAT ME invites witness to the intimate rituals of dining, bathing and desire, illuminating cultural contempt for dark femininity within a collaged feast of myth, ritual and archetype.
The table is set
Sit up nicely
And undress
Take the blade
Leverage the cut
Slip quietly inside
Loss within loss within loss
Biting soft
salt and tears
kiss of the sea
In the deep under dark
the stirring of
YES
EAT ME
Duration
45 minutes, no interval
Content Advice
This performance features partial nudity and the use of raw, organic materials. Viewer discretion is advised
Artistic & Production Team
COLLABORATORS & CONTRIBUTORS
Choreography & performance by Jessica Thompson
Costuming sourced and styled by Jessica Thompson
Music/Sound by Felicia Atkinson
Lighting Design by Joe Paradise Lui
Images & motion projection by Studio Ridler
Produced by Arianna Marchiori
Production/ Stage Management Katya Shevtsov
TEAM BIOS
Choreography and performance, Jessica Thompson
Jessica is a Naarm/Melbourne-based independent dancer and movement artist. A graduate of The Australian Ballet School, she toured globally as a company artist with leading national institutions including The Australian Ballet and Sydney Dance Company. Her extensive career features masterworks by traditional and modern choreographers alongside multi disciplinary creative collaborations. As an independent solo artist, Jessica bridges classical precision with experimental contemporary embodiment. Her recent solo and collaborative highlights include performing in Yuiko Masukawa’s Yugen at the Frame Festival and co-creating new independent dance seasons across Melbourne. This solo work is her first and blends her deep lineage of technical movement mastery with visceral storytelling.
Producer, Arianna Marchiori
Arianna is an Italian-born professional ballet dancer, producer, and the Founder and Artistic Director of M.Collective. Her international dance career spans Europe, North America, and Australia, having performed with acclaimed companies including San Francisco Ballet, English National Ballet, Dortmund Ballet, Ballet Ireland, and the National Ballet of Ostrava. Her repertoire includes classical masterpieces like Swan Lake and Don Quixote, alongside contemporary works by Mauro Bigonzetti and Ohad Naharin. Since relocating to Melbourne, Arianna has expanded her creative leadership into arts management and independent producing. She is the creative, founding force behind M Collective Dance, an independent collective presenting intimate and exclusive new contemporary work in Melbourne. She has worked closely with local avant-garde mainstays Theatre Works and Speak Percussion, and recently served as Associate Producer for Brothers Bare (Melbourne Fringe). Arianna is passionate about driving cross-disciplinary, movement-based storytelling and fostering collaborative community platforms.
Production/ Stage manager, Katya Shevtsov
Katya is a highly versatile Australian stage manager, production coordinator, and multi-disciplinary theatre maker. A graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), her extensive career spans premier national arts institutions, major festivals, and independent avant-garde spaces. Her prominent behind-the-scenes credits include serving as Stage Manager for Home (Patch Theatre and Restless Dance Theatre) at the Space Theatre and its subsequent state-wide tour, alongside handling event logistics for the Adelaide Festival. Katya's unique background as an elite physical performer and puppeteer heavily informs her technical stagecraft, precision management, and collaborative approach to live theatre.
Joe Paradise Lui, Lighting Design
Joe is a highly prolific Singaporean-born lighting designer, writer, and composer who recently relocated from Perth to Melbourne. A central figure in the Western Australian independent sector, Joe has designed for Black Swan State Theatre Company, Yirra Yaakin, and The Blue Room Theatre, with standout lighting credits including I Am My Own Wife and You Know We Belong Together. Since moving eastward, Joe has embedded into the Victorian mainstage scene, designing landmark productions for Melbourne Theatre Company (Is God Is, A Streetcar Named Desire, Uncle Vanya) and Malthouse Theatre (This Is Living, Anna K). Joe brings an atmospheric, experimental, and technically precise lens to every stage.
Music/ Sound, Felicia Atkinson
Félicia is an internationally acclaimed Parisian-born avant-garde musician, electroacoustic composer, and sound designer. Known for her deeply atmospheric and tactile sonic landscapes, her multifaceted practice weaves together field recordings, MIDI instrumentation, piano, and spoken-word poetry in both French and English. She has performed extensively at prestigious global venues and festivals, including the Barbican Centre (London), Philharmonie de Paris, and the Melbourne Open House / Monash University Museum of Art. Alongside her solo recording career on Shelter Press—the independent label and publishing house she co-founded—Félicia frequently designs bespoke audio work for filmmakers and premier global fashion houses like Prada and Burberry. She brings a highly transportive, cinematic, and boundary-pushing approach to live audio environments. Her music used in EAT ME utilises pre existing arrangements selected by Felicia to support of the specific themes and arc of the work.
The production also draws upon atmospheric, mid-90s trip-hop and cinematic downtempo beats underscored by sultry, gritty, and iconic lo-fi noir music (DC licence and artist TBC)
Images & motion projection, Studio Ridler
Justin Ridler is an innovative Melbourne-based visual artist, director, and fashion photographer operating at the intersection of physical and virtual mediums. Renowned for integrating traditional photography with cutting-edge digital technologies, his practice frequently blends computer-generated imagery (CGI), 3D animation, and motion capture to abstract and capture human performance. A regular collaborator with premier performing arts companies like The Australian Ballet and Sydney Dance Company, Justin’s editorial and commercial portfolio also spans global luxury houses including Prada, Dior, and Vogue. For this production, Justin leverages his unique approach to motion and space-time physics to deliver striking photographic elements and immersive motion projections.
Special thanks to La Macina di San Cresci, The Australian Ballet and City Dance Centre for their generous support and provision of space to create this work.
The first development of EAT ME was undertaken in Tuscany, Italy in August 2025 at La Macina di San Cresci ARTS. Below is a reflective description of the work as it found its flavour and began to form.
“This project is part initiation, part interrogation and part fascination. It is a glorious soft bodied creature waiting to be eaten whole and a black pearl formed in the place between my desires and my knowing, my reality and my sense of what must yet come to pass. It is a vigil for the eternal girl and a dance in her honour. It is a coronation of lived experience of deeply feminine, expressive love.
I’m inspired and held close by the Ancient Greek and Roman myths of Demeter/Persephone, Medusa and Venus as relevant to modern femininity. The work explores how feminine desire relates to culture, history (the personal and collective) and finds maturity through receptive and expressive integration. I am interested in providing options within the framework of the staging and choreography to allow the dance and the dancer’s instincts and longings to decide the conclusion of the work. I suppose this is somewhat reflective of my recent profound experience of time as having non solid boundaries and non- linear properties across a lifetime and perhaps, even beyond it.
As wisdom is gained through repetition and lived experience can the reality of the work shift to become reflective of accumulative perspective? Will the dancer choose evolution or destruction, love or despair, resurrection or obliteration?”
First development, La Macina di San Cresci, Florence, Italy, July 2025
